Born in 1965 in Camagüey, Cuba's largest inland city, Omar Sosa began his musical study at age eight, studying percussion and marimba before taking up piano as a teenage student at the prestigious Escuela Nacional de Música in Havana. Amassing a unique alchemy of influences that includes traditional Afro-Cuban music, European classical composers (including Chopin, Bartok, and Satie), Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Oscar Peterson, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Chucho Valdés, and the pioneering Cuban jazz group Irakere, he ultimately relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1995, where he was soon invigorating the Latin jazz scene with his adventurous writing and percussive style.

Annually performing upwards of 100 concerts on six continents, Sosa has appeared in venues as diverse as the Blue Note, Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and numerous notable jazz festivals across the globe. He's garnered several Grammy nominations and has released a string of well-regarded solo albums in the last decade.

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MELISSA ALDANA QUARTET

Melissa Aldana recently won the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz saxophone competition where this year’s panel of judges included saxophonists Wayne Shorter, Jimmy Heath, Bobby Watson, Branford Marsalis and Jane Ira Bloom. The first female instrumentalist to take first prize in this event since its inception in 1987, Melissa was awarded $25,000 in scholarship money and a recording contract with the Concord Music Group. The 24–year old, wrote Ben Ratliff in The New York Times, has “gotten serious as a bandleader in New York over the last few years; she’s made two records on Greg Osby’s label, Inner Circle Music, with a move forward to this year’s Second Cycle. Her performance...covered great range of form and sound: controlled and loose, old and new, learned and intuitive. She was patient but showed that she could be extravagant. She used some calculated set pieces but also let go of them.”